Every child entering elementary school has acquired an adequate control of the basic structures of some language system. The English teacher must tailor his goals and methods to exploit this competence. The basic linguistic system which has been internalized by children who speak non-standard English is different enough from standard English to require a specialized approach to English teaching. In the author's discussion of her work with prefreshmen at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, she points out some of the more salient features of Negro dialect which are more like the English-based Creoles than standard English. (The Creole languages express possessive relationship, number distinction in nouns and verbs, past tense in verbs, and cases of pronouns by different means than the Indo-European languages.) Unless teachers understand that this is a valid system with its own grammatical rules, they cannot intelligently guide the children into an acquisition of the new system that is so much like their own that the possibility of linguistic interference increases at every turn. It is not imperative that teachers become linguists, but it seems "mandatory" that those who work with non-standard speakers should be required to have an introductory course in linguistics to alert them to the pervasive nature of some of the problems, and to provide them with the minimum necessary tools for coping with some of them. (AMM)